Tennyson's theodicy ranks with such other comprehensive, profound corollaries of his philosophical theology as his spiritual sense. He, like Milton
and the authoror the Book of Job, attempts to vindicate the justice of God,
especially God's ordaining or permitting natural and moral evil. Ricks,
in finding "affinities" between In Memoriam and John Berryman's Dream
Songs, points out that both are "theodicies."1Culler finds fault, however,
with the theodicy of In Memoriam: "Tennyson is not attempting a complete
theodicy. . . . Rather he offers . . . mere guesses at truth, which dimple
the surface of his pool of tears but do not penetrate to the depths."2 I
argue, to the contrary, that among the most successful characteristics of In
Momoriam is its impulse toward theodicy.

Boyd-Carpenter tells an anecdote fraught with implications for the
poem's theodiceal aspect:

{Tennyson} never shirked the hard and dismaying facts of life. Once
he made me take to my room Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man.
There never was such a passionate philippic against Nature as this
book contained. The universe was one vast scene of murder; the deep
aspirations and noble visions of men were the follies of flies buzzing
for a brief moment in the presence of inexorable destruction. Life
was bottled sunshine; death the silent-footed butler who withdrew
the cork. The book, with its fierce invective, had a strange rhapsodical charm. It put with irate and verbose extravagance the fact that
sometimes

Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against {man's} creed

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